Ácoma, the Sky City: A Study in Pueblo-Indian History and Civilization

Acoma perches 370 feet above the New Mexican desert on a sandstone mesa so improbable that Spanish explorers in 1540 believed they had glimpsed the edge of heaven. This 1927 study captures the Sky City at a critical moment: before roads connected it to the modern world, before the Bureau of Indian Affairs reshaped its governance, while elder storytellers still remembered ceremonies reaching back centuries. Sedgwick draws on Spanish colonial records and her own careful observation to reconstruct Acoma's history, its intricate kinship systems, its sacred geometries, and the ceramic traditions that made Acoma pottery legendary across the Southwest. She writes with evident reverence for a people who had endured drought, conquest, and cultural assault yet maintained their distinctive Keres language and spiritual practices. The book carries an undertone of urgency. Sedgwick understood that the Acoma she documented was already changing, that the old ways faced pressure from a rapidly modernizing America. What she preserved in these pages is not merely historical data but a portrait of resilience itself: a civilization that had learned to build its homes in the sky to survive, and had turned that survival into art.